RELIGION BEFORE THE AGE OF DOUBT

So sweet is the forbidden fruit! Such was the miracle that saved Russian Orthodox Christianity from the sad fate of European Christianity, destroyed by complacency and trivialization… Some will say that the price was too high, and I am often saying that myself, about the year 1917, and of course about the 1990’s.

But objective history has a different set of ethics than a compassionate individual, and it judges people and events by its own standards of good and bad, right and wrong. And who are we to quarrel with history?..

Religion was part of me growing up, and going to church was always a delightful magical experience. There was a mildly conspiratorial element there too: the separation of Church and State meant only one thing, that having icons in the home, going to church services, and talking about God, were very special activities of a far higher rank than anything mundane, such as going to school, or reciting those square Soviet slogans, for instance. It was also a necessary part of being a Russian, and the bond tying together “us Russians” was that much stronger, being sanctified by God and the Batyushka, the Russian Orthodox priest.

It is incredibly important to develop such a comprehensive socio-religious experience early on in the age of childhood innocence, that is, before the age of doubt sets in. I am afraid that religion all by itself without the national-cultural element can hardly withstand the assault of an iconoclastic all-doubting mind, except when that mind is rather feeble, or else under very special circumstances when that mind is strong and mysticism-prone. Otherwise, religion’s inability to answer the rational questions asked of knowledge, will quickly put it at a disadvantage, before the young mind had a chance to reach the level of adult maturity.

The Russian Orthodox are particularly fortunate in this respect, because the fact that your religion is tightly linked to your national and cultural identity is a logically comprehensible argument, and as such it is bound to withstand the assault of the inquisitive mind.

Anyway, as this applied to my spiritual experience, I was a strongly religious person in my childhood, and I remained perhaps an even stauncher believer in my young adulthood, as, for me, the Russian Orthodox faith had developed into an indispensable part of being a Russian.